Pat Buchanan and the intellectuals

National Review, Feb 17, 1992 by William McGurn

It's normally easy to tell where Buchanan stands. Some of his supporters are making it harder.

NOT LEAST among Patrick J. Buchanan's attractive attributes is a clarity of purpose all too rare in politics. Even his critics concede him that. "He does not fudge. He does not trim," wrote Mark Shields in a recent Washington Post column otherwise chiding Buchanan for endorsing immigration policies that would have kept great-grandmother Anna Kerrigan back in County Cork. And the above sample of Buchanan's opinions on trade would seem to leave little ambiguity about his protectionist sympathies.

Or so I thought. But when I phoned some of the economists around him, men with impeccable free-trade credentials, I discovered a marked reluctance to invoke the P word. Of the four economists Buchanan listed in a December 30 Wall Street Journal profile as his favorites - Richard Rahn, Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul, and Paul Craig Roberts - both Roberts and Paul objected to my characterization. Greenspan could not be reached. Only Rahn, former chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accepted it, adding he was worried that this would reduce Buchanan's credibility against President Bush.

Further illumination was provided during a weekend at the Dulles Airport Ramada Renaissance Hotel, where the John Randolph Club was holding its second annual meeting. While Buchanan did not attend, he is the best-known member of the club, a sort of Patriot-missile marriage of oldline libertarians and paleoconservatives who embraced in shared opposition to the Gulf War. Over the course of the weekend what one member dubbed "the Buchanan Brains Trust" explored everything from crime and culture to property and small-r republicanism. But the real thesis, nailed to the conservative door in the Saturday dinner speech by the club's new president, Murray Rothbard, was that somewhere after the 1940s American conservatism had gone wrong, horribly wrong, and that the John Randolph Club was here to take it back. He was pretty about who was to blame, too.

"What happened to the original Right, and the cause of the present mess, was the advent and domination of the right wing by Bill Buckey and the NATIONAL REVIEW," said Rothbard, a libertarian and professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Henceforth, the continued, the Right would be defined only by Buchanan. "The original Right, and all its heresies, is back," he gleefully reported.

An Earlier Split

IF ROTHBARD'S assessment of the intellectual support of Pat Buchanan is accurate - and I think it mostly is - this is something much larger than a difference over free trade. The wrong turn meant here is not traceable to the 1991 intervention in the Gulf but to Bill Buckley's purge in the mid Sixties of sundry "non-respectables" (Birchers, Randians, anti-Zionists, etc.) and the subsequent Draft Goldwater campaign. The inescapable implication is that Ronald Reagan too was not really a legitimate representative of the Right. Again, Rothbard is admirably direct. "I never call myself a Reaganite," he says. "In the Seventies we had a whole anti-government movement from people fed up with regulation to the anti-war movement. The worst thing Reagan did was to et everyone to like government again."

Whatever the reason, Reagan was scarcely mentioned. Named for the Virginia congressman who championed state's rights, opposed the War of 1812, and fought tariffs, the John Randolph Club might, in a different context, have had an energizing effect on the Republican Party - getting both the Randolphites and the Reaganites to recognize their complementary interests in reducing government. Many things the club espouses receive hearty endorsement from all conservatives, hyphenated or not: school choice, lower taxes, no to quotas, opposition to Bushism. Instead, the club has emphasized issues that are divisive, e.g., isolationism (okay, call it America Firstism), immigration, and a French-style commitment to Americanist culture. Many members - and not just the libertarians - reject the word "conservative."

Although Rothbard's address received a standing ovation - the seventy or so attendees especially liked his dismissal of Buckley as "the Mikhail Gorbachev of the conservative movement" - amusement does not necessarily imply total endorsement. Participants took paints to stress that the club adhered to neither party nor ideology. Tom Fleming, editor of Chronicles, summed it up best in his December issue, writing about the original America First. "It was opposition to the war and affection for their country that bound members together."

Members joked nostalgically about the Articles of Confederation, and, not surprisingly, reacted to the New World Order like a vampire to garlic. Certainly the phrasing is unfortunate: conservatives are properly suspicious of anything "new," wary of "world" as an adjective, and distrustful any time the word "order" is unjoined to the word "law." Eyes rolled heavenward during the luncheon address, when Thomas Molnar took protectionism further than anyone else by proposing the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church as the official religion of the United States. Otherwise, libertarians listened politely when paleoconservatives plumed for state measures to protect and enforce a distinctive American culture; and paleocons didn't bring up abortion or drugs when libertarians had the pulpit.